On April 8, writer, journalist and former director of De Balie Chris Keulemans presented Eric Kluitenberg’s new book Delusive Spaces. Below is the full text of his presentation.
“The first time I realized this was not just another postmodern Internet geek, dressed in black and locked behind his computer, was on a summer night in Belgrade, 1997. One of Radio B92’s young activists was walking me towards their provisional studio. She asked me for names of people she could invite to give lectures about tactical media to their crowd. ‘And not,’ she said in that quasi-cosmopolitan, blasé little tone so typical of savvy Belgradians at the time, ‘not the usual suspects like Geert Lovink and Eric Kluitenberg.’ Wow, I thought, if Geert and Eric are already so famous here that they’re regarded as old news, that a girl like this even pronounces their complicated names as if she discusses them every day, these guys must have made quite an impression in parts of Europe that were still hardly familiar in Amsterdam back in those days.
If there was ever a place where it was attractive to believe that the physical and the digital were two different and separated spaces, it must have been Belgrade in the late nineties. In between the Bosnian and Kosovo wars, Milošević’ oppressive regime was omnipresent. You could smell the atmosphere of fear, hatred and intimidation in the streets. B92’s ability to create an expanding network of alternative music and information, through radio and internet, was impressive. While the real world of politics and everyday life was uglier than ever, the new media scene in Belgrade seemed to be the perfect example of how digital revolutionaries could thrive and really matter in their virtual oasis. This was the dream, at the time, of media activists all over the world.
Eric Kluitenberg was an early sceptic. His new book, Delusive Spaces, includes a few texts from that period. ‘To consider these domains, the physical and the virtual, as distinct is simply absurd,’ he wrote at the time in a text on the so-called new freedom, ‘and it does not assist with understanding what the emergency of these technologies actually signifies for the individual or for society.’ His wake-up call came early and it was serious. ‘It is much more straightforward to see the embodied and electronically mediated as two aspects of the same experiential, social and political reality. In other words, to assume one ‘hybrid’ reality that consists of both physically embodied and electronically mediated elements. Such an approach foregrounds the hybridization of most common spheres of everyday life, where the contradictory logics of physical existence and electronic mediation continuously affect and confront each other.’
This tension between his scepsis about the liberating myth of technological progress and his irrepressible belief in the potential of new alternatives is the driving force behind this book. And an impressive book it is. Impressive, inspirational and, I hope, influential.
Eric is, as many good listeners and avid readers are when they turn their insights into a book, a generous writer. He salutes the media activists from the Baltics, the Balkans and elsewhere who have inspired him along the way, sometimes simply by their heartfelt shouts coming from an audience during one of the many workshops and events he organized or addressed over the past years. And he pays respect to the great thinkers and artists of earlier times who influenced his analysis of media, culture and technology. Not just by quoting and interpreting them, but by arguing with what they have to tell us today. Even if you would read the book just for the critical dialogue with the likes of Lewis Mumford, Marcel Duchamp, Michel Foucault and Jean-Francois Lyotard, it would be more than worth your while. Thanks to this book, I will never be able to think of archives again without thinking of Foucault, of machines without Mumford, of the unholy trinity of capitalism, technoscience and avantgarde without Lyotard, and of brides and bachelors without Duchamp.
In its generosity, this book at times becomes almost like a message without a sender, an open form of communication where everyone contributes and no one claims authorship. It becomes an exercise in common knowledge, in the sharing of resources – a very unusual, and almost impossible thing to say about such a static and linear medium as a book. But of course, in a book that opens by recalling the lesson that Lyotard learned from 20th century artistic avantgarde – every image conceals more than it reveals – you are tempted to go and search for the identity of the author who hides himself so skilfully behind this generosity. What does the book tell us about this guy who holds the deepest suspicion for what fascinates him most, the technological culture that man creates and inhabits?
He is a man without a cellphone. He regards the right to disconnect as a fundamental human right. He met the love of his life during a series of artistic interventions in Moscow’s public space that restored his confidence in the subversive potential of art. His neverending curiosity is only outdone by that of their dog Savva. He is an unflinching democrat, who takes it as a given that the only sane world is one that is governed by the voice, in all its occasional insanity, of real people. He is a man so serious in his awareness of the violence within the machine, that his rare, sly little jokes strike you like a fist. He is so in awe of the human imagination and desire to reach beyond the boundaries of language that he confines himself to a style of writing that looks almost modest, crisp, unlyrical. And finally, like the vegetarian owner of a hamburger joint, he is a man immersed in media culture who has this thing for the unrepresentable.
Is that a way out, an attempt to escape the tyranny of representation that we live in today? No, it’s a way in. Let me explain. The three domains that Eric tracks and connects throughout this book – capitalism, technoscience and the pictorial avantgarde of the 20th century – share, again in the words of Lyotard, ‘an affinity to infinity’. They are all obsessed by that which we cannot conceive or imagine, while we know and can prove that it exists. Infinity, although we can understand it to be real, is by definition urepresentable. And it is there, in the realm outside of what we can see and even imagine, that Eric locates the desperate battle between art and power. ‘Power today,’ he writes, ‘is vested not in the ability to connect and become visible, but in the ability to disconnect, to become invisible and untraceable, at will. This is the paradox: under conditions of complete media transparency, decision making retreats from the public sphere altogether. Agency today is located outside the domain of visibility.’ At the same time, precisely because of this predicament, he asks of art to find its own position on the outside. As a critical force, as an act of electronic civil disobedience, to open up ‘the infinity of all possible alternative modes of how the new hybridized social spaces could be constructed.’ The outside is a last resort, the last place that has not yet completely surrendered to the domination of power, capitalism and technology. In other words: ‘If anything, the incorporation of everything, even our biological bodies, into technological, functionalist and utilitarian systems in the real-time society described in this book, asks for a fundamental critique. Such a critique, however, requires an outside, an external point of reference from where it can be launched.’ To make a difference inside the system, you have to start on the outside. So the fundamental question, to which this book is dedicated, must be: ‘Is it possible to define an ‘outside’ to these utilitarian systems of complete determination, or societies of control, as Deleuze has named them?’
And yes, in the final chapters of this book, Eric does manage to reveal a glimpse of this outside. It’s a stirring experience to read these pages. The crisp, unlyrical sentences open up ever so slightly to an excitement barely contained. Like the painter Barnett Newman, he offers a crack in the surface, a split that tells us life has not come to an end, that history does not inevitably lead to just one next step, but to innumerable possible next steps.
Although he starts out modestly in the first chapter, not claiming any methodology or central hypothesis, there is a strong and thoroughly educated undercurrent to the book. He will always prefer the unknown over the existing order, the deviation over the system, the imaginary media over the clock, La Mettrie over Descartes, the open-ended commons over the finality of war, the chaos of democracy over Virilio’s politics of immediacy, jodi.org over youtube. But a summary like this doesn’t do the book justice. Like any serious work of art, its multitude of stories and ideas cannot be reduced to a single message. In between its author and his glimpse of infinity, it leaves the reader a wide open space to explore, to study, to enjoy and to enter into critical dialogue. Let me finish by saying that I will never be able to think of anything digital again without thinking of Eric Kluitenberg.”
– Chris Keulemans, 8 April 2008